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Please don't learn to code

codinghorror.com

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Re: Please don't learn to code

#41

Post by gordonguthrie »

d4nt wrote: post #36

I think the whole everyone should learn to code this is right, but a little ahead of its time. A little like saying that peasant farmers in the bronze age should learn to read and write. While 100% literacy is now acknowledge as a good thing it took a while to get here. A farmer these days absolutely needs to read and write. But a bronze age farmer? Not so much. I personally think that one day it will be impossible t…

> current development tools somewhere a kin to Egyptian heiroglyphics. You can do the basic things like...

Ah, no. Heiroglyphics is just somewhere between an alphabet and syllabary - there are 60 odd symbols and they match to sounds like 'a', 'ts', 'gh'.

The stuff you see in museums is the 'posh' stuff for best, there is a quick writing version of it (also known as heiratic) where the full pictures were made more abstract.

> Could Shakespeare have written what he did in hieroglyphics?

For 3,000 years everybody did. Oh, and don't forget little things like inventing hydrolic engineering in hieroglyphics.

Hieroglyphics is as good a writing system as this text I am typing.

> You could argue that Excel is a programming environment.

Actually Excel/spreadsheets are THE programming environment - used by millions of people every day to perform their daily work - loads more than use obscure programming specialist dialects/paradigms like Ruby, or Java or whatever.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#42

Post by primecommenter »

jkahn wrote: post #33
primecommenter wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the distinction you raise in the first paragraph. Coding is programming. Just because everyone can divide doesn't mean everyone is trying to be a mathematician, but I think everyone should (at least have the opportunity to) learn long division. Programming may not be the fourth "R", but maybe "Research" is!

When I said programmer, I meant a professional programmer - as an occupation.

As opposed to a professional "coder"? (I also see "programmer" as a more distinguished title and I prefer it to "coder" (and even "software engineer"), but I don't understand any of these terms to have any generally-accepted definition; personally it is only a matter of taste.)

Re: Please don't learn to code

#43

Post by MortenK »

shin_lao wrote: post #14

I don't like this post and what it implies. If tomorrow you want to learn to cook, how would you feel if a master chef told you "No, don't. You'll never be as good as me. If you're hungry, come to my restaurant instead". I think there's nothing wrong with learning a new skill, whoever you are, whatever you do. Learning new skills is what makes us human.

But should it be mandatory for everybody to learn cooking on the same level as reading and writing? Is it such a basic requirement, that we're decreasing our children's chance of success, if we don't teach them cooking (edit: Again, on the same level as reading and writing)?

Apart from at least a fundamental ability to use a stove, it is naturally not that crucial of an ability. The argument of the blog post is that it is the same with programming, i.e. It is not a necessity to succeed in life to know how to code.

I don't think the point of the post is to discourage anybody from learning to code. Rather it is a counterpoint to the recently heavily promoted idea that programming is somehow a necessary life skill.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#44

Post by rsaarelm »

I like the "computational thinking" concept for computing literacy that doesn't imply being a professional programmer, as described in this article: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wing/publications/Wing06.pdf

Familiarity with those concepts might help bureaucrats with organizational planning even if they never wrote a line of actual computer code. Programming is first about making things so clear and well-understood even a computer can handle them, and only second about actually making a computer do them.

Atwood might have a point in that if someone just goes off to learn to code using a cookie-cutter course, they might not really learn to work with the more important first part, but might end up like a JavaScript programmer who has no idea about Turing-completeness instead: http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/579047.html

Re: Please don't learn to code

#45

Post by icebraining »

derekerdmann wrote: post #29
shin_lao wrote: post #14

I don't like this post and what it implies. If tomorrow you want to learn to cook, how would you feel if a master chef told you "No, don't. You'll never be as good as me. If you're hungry, come to my restaurant instead". I think there's nothing wrong with learning a new skill, whoever you are, whatever you do. Learning new skills is what makes us human.

Cooking may not be the best analogy. What if everyone started learning to build bridges instead? Sure, the general population might benefit from knowing how bridges work and what loads they can take, but when a bunch of inexperienced, improperly educated bridge-builders start trying to create new ones because it pays well, we end up with dangerous bridges. Jeff's article is trying to point out that while understandin…

Shoddy bridges aren't bad, relying on them is. The fact that Bloomberg will write some code doesn't mean we'll have to use it, just like I have plenty of code in my HD that I don't throw into the world, because it's absolute crap.

If we could all build bridges in the our own yard, I think we'd see some of new fantastic bridges which we could re-use. With coding, we can.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#46

Post by mseebach »

That article is so full of strawmen, it's not even funny.

The existence of individuals who wouldn't gain much from learning to code does not imply that no one will gain much from learning to code.

I have a hunch that the vast majority of regular office workers has at least some portion of their work which can be trivially automated. Knowing how to code maybe allows these workers to go and code up a script - but even if they can't, it might allow them to identify this and state their work in terms of programming, thus vastly lowering the barrier to getting someone else to do the actual programming.

A workforce that can accurately say "this is a computers work" opens floodgates of productivity increases.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#47

Post by primecommenter »

tomstuart wrote: post #20

This is a depressingly philistine perspective. A basic grasp of computational thinking has never been more important. It's become a prerequisite for making informed decisions about the world we live in. The world may or may not need more working programmers (or mathematicians, novelists or plumbers), but why wouldn't we want to teach these elementary skills to as many people as possible?

Indeed, why not? This is no more or less as exciting an announcement as that of a new knitting hobby.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#48

Post by its_so_on »

There are few jobs I can think of where learning a TINY little bit of coding could help as much as when you're Mayor of New York (or a major CEO, etc). If the guy figures out nothing else than that he can make a program to keep tally counts as he discards emails, he just has to click which category they belong to, or that he can send form letters programmatically, he will be far more productive. Yes, aides do both of these things, but with code you don't have to communicate what you want someone to do, you can just do it and tweak it until it's most helpful for you - when you're the one in total control you are just so much more productive.

I basically completely disagree with this submission.

Re: Please don't learn to code

#49

Post by pferde »

d4nt wrote: post #36

I think the whole everyone should learn to code this is right, but a little ahead of its time. A little like saying that peasant farmers in the bronze age should learn to read and write. While 100% literacy is now acknowledge as a good thing it took a while to get here. A farmer these days absolutely needs to read and write. But a bronze age farmer? Not so much. I personally think that one day it will be impossible t…

> A little like saying that peasant farmers in the bronze age should learn to read and right.

Oh, the irony. :)

Re: Please don't learn to code

#50

Post by res »

I was hoping we'd see another fine article from Jeff Atwood on the important distinction between coding and programming, something that is sometimes derided as largely pedantic, yet never fails to arouse interesting discussion.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a more blunt, standoffish interpretation of Peter Norvig's classic article on the long road to programming competence "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years." Jeff Atwood even references the article in this post, which I find disheartening, as Peter Norvig never once says something like "Don't even bother." Self-improvement is hardly a fruitless endeavor, and while not everyone is capable of writing good code, much less making a living off of it, there are a lot of wonderful things you could learn about yourself through such an undertaking. Plus, there are far less productive/interesting ways for people to spend what precious little time they have.

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